Red-Shouldered Hawk Diet

The red-shouldered hawk, a bird with brownish colors on its shoulders, is a common raptor of the eastern United States. The red-shouldered hawk lives in lowland forested areas, especially in areas where it can find water, such as swamps, streams, and rivers. The red-shouldered hawk, according to the Chattahoochee Nature Center website, is not a "picky eater."

  1. Types

    • The diet of the average red-shouldered hawk is widely varied and includes anything small enough for it to kill. Large insects such as crickets, grasshoppers, and praying mantises are on the menu, as are frogs, crayfish, toads, snakes, and other reptiles and amphibians. Small mammals such as mice, voles, moles, chipmunks, rabbits, and squirrels are all fair game for a red-shouldered hawk. The hawk will also kill and eat other birds.

    Summer Versus Winter Diet

    • The menu of the red-shouldered hawk changes from winter to summer. In the colder months the hawk hunts and eats warm-blooded prey such as small mammals and other birds. However, the bird prefers to eat cold-blooded creatures like crayfish, bugs, frogs, and snakes when the opportunity presents itself in the hot days of summer. Red-shouldered hawks living in the north often migrate southward to where the hunting will be better in the winter.

    Hunting from Perches

    • The "National Audubon Society Field Guide to Birds" states that a swampy area is a favorite spring and summer haunt of the red-shouldered hawk. The raptor will perch unseen and silent in a branch of a tree overlooking any water, scanning the landscape for any activity. Its perch will typically be low, and when the hawk sees a potential meal, it will swoop rapidly down and grab it with its sharp talons, killing it and then bringing it back to its perch to consume it.

    Ground Hunting

    • If a red-shouldered hawk knows that a small mammal is in its burrow, the bird may sometimes quietly land on the ground close by and patiently wait for the animal to appear. Once the animal comes out, the hawk will hop after it in pursuit, hoping to get close enough to kill it with its beak and talons.

    Owls and Crows

    • This species of hawk has a formidable enemy in the great horned owl, a bird that will gladly kill and eat the young when it gets a chance. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology website says that sometimes a red-shouldered hawk will distract an owl long enough for its mate to raid the owl's own nest, killing its nestlings. Crows and the red-shouldered hawks will frequently chase each other through the sky and attempt to take whatever food they may have from one another, but both these birds will combine to drive owls away from their territories.